What a fantastic demonstration of the fact that a statement doesn't have to be false in order to be highly misleading.
"Fake" (i.e. blatantly incorrect) news isn't the main problem in out media landscape. Headlines like this one are, which are technically correct, yet are (usually intentionally) crafted to lead the average reader to a conclusion that can be the exact opposite of what is really happening.
2. It is genuinely interesting if we're moving from a 4:1 to 2:1 M:F suicide rate, and I think that can be placed on social media. And if there is a single concrete cause of the change in ratio, that increase in female suicide rates can be reversed. That would be a good thing, even if it only improves young women's lives.
3. As unfair as it is, people don't give a shit about male suicide rates; the general response is "they deserve it," and no argumentation is going to change their minds. If people start seeing suicide as an issue that affects both sexes, perhaps that can provide the basis for some policy that will have the unintended effect of helping male suicide rates.
Which makes the headline, which is the only thing the vast majority of people will look at (something the author is well aware of), even more disingenuous bordering on dishonest.
So when they don't make it the headline, it's a conspiracy. When they make it the headline, it's still a conspiracy? At a certain point, we need to accept the fact that you're the one that's hopeless.
There is a broader point that is being missed and that is, in the Anglo-sphere people don’t care much about mental health at all, we stigmatize mental health as a weakness (thanks puritans!), so yes men don’t seek access to mental healthcare as openly as women and that drives other outcomes like higher suicide rates, higher levels of stress related medical issues and in the extremes mass-shootings.
A "fun" fact: the majority of men who commit suicide do seek mental health services. And the mental health system fails them. Shifting it purely to a matter of "men are just too toxic to seek mental health services" is just a thinly veiled way to blame men for their suicides.
A gentle nudge, I hope.
I'm not sure how the examples you give place any undue onus on individual men, nor how they absolve society at large.
I read both examples as gesturing at how the society socializes boys and what it expects of men. I doubt many would suggest individual men are making abstract, rational, uninfluenced, ruggedly-individual decisions to prefer suicide over seeking mental healthcare.
We're all responsible for how we expect people to perform their gender (and how our personal expectations factor in to what society at large expects), but the most-direct way to change those expectations is to reject them at scale.
In this case, men have the greatest leverage to initiate change. The point isn't that millions of men need to individually make a quiet decision to seek mental healthcare in secret--it's that millions of men can change the weather here if they individually choose to reject traditional expectations (including the reigning hyperagent ideology you cite) and make space for others to follow.
I hope it's obvious that retooling our gendered expectations of men (as a society) is a thread that's at least worth pulling on with respect to reducing male suicide rates. I hope it's also clear that a lot of individual men would have roles to play in that process.
You're right that it isn't the whole story. Creating the preconditions for men to readily seek mental healthcare doesn't matter much if the care isn't obtainable for other reasons. But I think it's a reasonable focus until there's good evidence that men are motivated to seek care that isn't ~accessible.
---
Few social problems are best addressed with an answer from one perspective.
Some people over-flatten the gender pay gap, for example, into something inflicted on women by a culture that doesn't value them like it does men. Some people over-flatten it into something women inflict on themselves when they aren't as likely to negotiate a higher salary, ask for raises, job-hop, work in more dangerous industries, put in gobs of overtime, pursue management positions, get STEM degrees, and so on.
Some read the former as shirking personal responsibility and begging society for equal outcomes. Some people read the latter as putting the onus on individual women, not on society at large.
We can break out of frames like these and focus on helping people flourish. Some of us may not be able to walk and chew gum--but some of us can walk, and some of us can chew gum.
i grew up without friends for various reasons, and i spent a lot of time alone and isolated, but, at the same time i also grew up without anyone ever putting any kind of undue expectations on me. of course i was expected to help at home with some housework, but when it didn't happen i was never made to feel guilty about it.
i believe for me this freedom from expectations counteracted the negative effects of not having friends. it allowed me to pursue my interests only limited by financial resources.
when i saw as a young adult how many people had expectations on others, i did what you suggest, and reject the whole idea. i had no desire to fit in. it's one reason why i left europe at the time.
i realized one of the problems europe has with immigrants is that expectation to assimilate and fit in. that particular problem is less strong in the US due to the less homogeneous society there, but it does exist there too. it's just a bit easier there to find your tribe as it were which lessens the difficulty of needing to fit in.
this is at the macro level, on the other hand at the individual level the problem remains. again for me that meant that since i grew up alone, it was a lot easier to stay away from people who had expectations that i didn't want to fulfill. if you weren't able to accept me as the person i was, you were not going to gain my friendship. i expect many others are not able to do that so easily. for them, losing a friend, or having trouble finding friends hurts a lot more.
i have a few friends. and i do want more friends, but not to the degree that i would give up my individuality as a human being in order to get those friends. in fact the worst experiences in my life were when people confronted me with specific expectations that i could not fulfill. my reaction was to protect myself by disconnecting from them.
Visit any Mastodon server and you can see this and other blood-curdling statements posted every day, often by people under their real name, and to the thunderous cheering of the crowds.
Not only that, in general men don't seek help from friends in the same way that women do with their social circles. It's not only professional help but camaraderie and support among men is very different (and lacking) compared to women.
This is all in general terms, of course.
Yes, for decades this attitude has been caricatured by the fake-but-entirely-too-plausible news headline "Male suicide rate increasing; women most affected". Something I would expect to see in the Guardian if not elsewhere.
"Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today’s warfare, victims. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children."
Source: https://clintonwhitehouse3.archives.gov/WH/EOP/First_Lady/ht...
Holy crap, it's true. Oh well. Still would have been a thousand times better than Trump.
It seems like you're framing gender dynamics as a zero-sum game, where improving the situation of one results in stepbacks the other. I agree that men do face significant struggles in today's society [1], but there are ways to move forward in ways that benefit everyone [2].
[1] Perry, Grayson. The Descent of Man. United Kingdom: Penguin Publishing Group, 2017.
[2] hooks, bell. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 2000.
So yeah people represented by the more afflicted group will find it particularly offensive that it's being reframed in yet another female-centric manner.
You start by saying that men have a harder time getting sympathy, and then minimize the same issue for women by implying that women who attempt suicide aren’t “trying” as hard and they don’t feel ‘actual’ distress but rather they are being manipulative.
There are a lot of ways to get attention, which is a totally normal thing for humans to want, and if someone is that desperate for it I think it’s safer to go ahead and assume it’s because they are actually unhappy and it’s worth addressing rather than calling them a liar?
> It seems like you're framing gender dynamics as a zero-sum game
With “lol ya”
But even if that wasn't the case, there is a measurable difference in the rate of change. The number of female suicides is increasing at a far faster rate than male suicides.
In a sense they're inversely correlated, since if at first you succeed, you'll never attempt again.
Unless you're specifically controlling for that by not counting subsequent attempts by the same person.
2. Suppose men succeed at suicide 30% of the time, and women succeed at suicide 3% of the time. The greatest risk factor for suicide attempts is having previously attempted suicide. A useful exercise: calculate the gender ratio of suicide attempts, assuming equal likelihood of a first attempt and repeating attempts until success.
That's exactly my point. The title is accurate. In the sense that its factual claims are correct.
But the same headline also implies conclusions that are not correct at all. And, knowing how the social "sciences" operate, this is not an accident.
Perhaps you're looking for some agenda, and perhaps that does exist in other places on the internet (apparently you read things you don't approve on on mastodon?). Whatever conclusions you drew from that, this article and title just doesn't seem like a good example of that and probably the wrong thing to get upset about.
In my opinion it's a good article and the title is both accurate and highlights the most significant conclusion.
> I believe Zach has made some real discoveries here. He demonstrates a pattern in girls’ suicide rates that has not been noticed or much discussed, as far as we can tell.
The article headline mentions girls, not in an attempt to downplay boys' suicides, but rather to emphasize a discovery that they believe that others haven't yet made.
For the same reason, a headline, "Suicide Rates Are high for Gen Z Across the Anglosphere, Especially for Boys" (note high; not up), doesn't discount that girls are also committing suicide. This headline would be apt for an article which highlights the gendered discrepancy in raw rates, rather than the gendered discrepancy in rates of increase.
To me, it seems like an okay headline. The focus of the story is on the change, so it's not wrong to focus on the areas that change more.
"An Analysis of Suicide Rates in the Anglosphere"
Shocking, right? It's basically an admission that the facts are too complex to compress into a half-sentence, and if the reader wants to understand them they should read the actual article.
But social cargo cult science has been operating like tabloid journalism for so long that this wouldn't even be considered.
The title as-is is accurate
Is it wrong to say the "gender wage gap narrowed" when men's inflation adjusted wages have fallen?
This article is highlighting how the increase in suicide rate amongst young women is greater than the overall increase in suicide rate is and pointing out probable causes for this. If something suddenly goes from 10% of the total to 20% of the total, why is pointing that problematic to you?
Talk about how male suicide is significantly higher and feminists will start shrieking about how teenage girls try more, because somehow that's more relevant than more boys actually dying from suicide.
It is absolutely not implying what you think it is.
> What a fantastic demonstration of the fact that a statement doesn't have to be false in order to be highly misleading.
Suicide rates can be rising but especially for girls, all the while keeping the ratio valid. One fact does not make the other invalid.
Its the landscape of framing. By now people should be familiar with the works of Edward Bernays.
Phrasing it as “at the same rate” makes me think... yeah, should they be different? I do see the point that the rate going up is bad and it’s currently trending closer in the wrong direction but I can also see how one might read the comment as suggesting that the rates specifically should not be the same.